This essay examines contemporary Algerian women's condition,
as it is articulated in Djebar's autobiographical novel, Vaste est
la prison (1995). After giving an overview of modern Algerian history, I
offer a reading of Djebar's novel that takes account of its
potential to produce social change. This essay demonstrates that Djebar
blurs the boundaries between autobiography, fiction and history in order
to fully utilize the subversive potential of writing. Using the
perspective of new historicism, I show how Djebar responds to her
country's unilateralism in language and its exclusion of women by
her unique rhetorical strategies, in order to restore women's
rightful place in Algerian history and present-day society. Djebar
challenges traditional patriarchal structures by demonstrating how
Algerian women throughout history have been agents of change who have
transmitted their multilingual cultural heritage from generation to
generation.

Assia Djebar's writings have a sense of urgency that compels
her readers to listen. The brutal legacy of 130 years of colonialism in
Algeria, followed by the bloody eight-year Algerian Revolution
(1954-1962) have left scars on a nation still struggling today to find
its political identity. Emerging from a decade-long civil war
(1992-2002) that claimed as many as 200,000 lives, (1) Algeria has still
not brought to justice many of those responsible for massacres, torture
and "disappearance" of civilians. (2)

For Assia Djebar--Algerian historian, novelist and filmmaker--the
repression of her compatriots, and in particular that of Algerian women,
is not part of the past, but is with us still today, as terrorist
attacks and civil rights violations continue. Djebar succinctly
describes her reason for writing: "I only know one rule ...: to
write only out of necessity ... What sustains [me] is the will to say or
the fierce desire to not forget ..." (3)

In this essay, after presenting an overview of Algerian history
since independence, I will examine Algerian women's condition as it
is articulated in Djebar's autobiographical novel, Vaste est la
prison (1995). (4) Just as new historicists (5) have probed the
boundaries between literature and history and have explored the
subversive potential of writing, (6) I want to offer a reading of
Djebar's work that takes account of its potential to produce social
change. What rhetorical strategies does Djebar employ in response to the
Algerian tragedy? What are the subversive poetics of her novel?

Contemporary Algerian History

Algeria was a French colony from 1830 to 1962, a longer period of
colonization than that of other Maghrebian countries. (7) During the
eight-year Algerian Revolution, led by the FLN (Front de Liberation
Nationale) women participated actively as nurses, cooks, spies and also
as armed combatants, and they bore a heavy weight of hardship during the
repression carried out against Algerians by French forces: one out of
every five female revolutionaries suffered imprisonment or death. (8)

Women, however, did not share equally with men in the benefits
accrued from establishing an independent nation in 1962. The FLN, which
became the single ruling political party after independence, used the
common denominator of Islam to mobilize public support both during the
war and during its aftermath. In the postwar struggle to create a
blueprint for a new Algeria, the spirit of reform and innovation gave
way to the immediate need of preserving the Arab-Islamic character of
the nation and of ridding it of the vestiges of French domination. (9) A
conscious effort was made to re-establish traditional conservative
values in Algeria. For women, this meant that the enactment of family
law was postponed for more than two decades during successive crises of
political leadership and that the ancient patriarchal structure of
Algerian society was maintained. (10) During the presidential regime of
Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-1965), women made substantial gains in civil and
political rights, achieving the right to vote and to be elected to
political office. (11) The constitution protected women's civil
rights in several important articles. Article 39 states: "Any
discrimination based on sex, race or occupation is forbidden."
Similarly, Article 42 states: "All political, economic, social and
cultural rights of Algerian women are guaranteed by the
constitution." (12) Despite their political gains, women's
social advancement was hampered by Algeria's conservative economic
and social policies during the late nineteen sixties and seventies.
While the number of women enrolled in school jumped to 1.5 million
between 1967 and 1977, Algeria had one of the lowest rates of women in
the workplace. (13)

In 1984, President Chadli Benjedid's government promulgated a
conservative Family Code that was faithful to shari'a (Islamic
law). According to historian Mounira Charrad, Algeria's Family Code
had been held hostage for more than two decades to political divisions.
The code that was finally implemented was based on patrilineal tribal
kinship ties, in order to win the support of the country's
conservative political base. (14) Benjedid's exclusion of women
from participation in the formulation of this code and the
commission's secrecy during the five years of the law's
creation (1979-1984) gave rise to women's widespread protests and
demonstrations. (15) This activism gave birth to Algeria's first
grassroots feminist movement--"Collectif 95 Maghreb
Egalite"--which continues its lobbying efforts for reform today.
(16)

With the enactment of the Family Code, the legal status of women
became that of permanent minors compared with the rights and duties of
Algerian men. (17) Under the statutes of this code, women are
discriminated against in matters of marriage, divorce, child custody and
inheritance. Walis (male guardians) continue to dictate the terms of
matrimonial agreements and Algerian women are forbidden from marrying
non-Muslims, while Algerian men have no restrictions on whom they may
marry. A woman's right to divorce is subject to a series of
qualifications, while men have retained an absolute right to unilateral
repudiation of a wife. (18) While child custody is normally awarded to
the mother, she may not make decisions on education or take a child out
of the country without the father's authorization. Polygamy is
legal for an Algerian man; he may take up to four wives. In inheritance
claims, women are entitled to a smaller portion of an estate than male
children or a deceased husband's brothers. (19) The legalized
inequalities of the Family Code have often played out in physical
violence against women in the home. A 2008 Human Rights Report of the U.
S. Department of State emphasized that the home was the "privileged
place for spousal violence," and reported about 4,500 assaults
against women during the first half of that year alone. (20)

Algerian family law is far more conservative than that of Tunisia
or Morocco, countries which, according to one international report, have
given women rights not enjoyed anywhere else in the Arab world. (21)
Although the Family Code was amended in 2005, both the U.S. Department
of State and Amnesty International continue to criticize its human
rights violations. (22) Family law was ultimately sacrificed to
political expediency, making women pawns in the larger issue of
Algeria's identity crisis. (23) During the presidency of Chadli
Benjedid, Algeria's growing socioeconomic crisis worsened, fed by
overpopulation, rising unemployment, a severe housing shortage in urban
areas, and the presence of a large alienated, disgruntled youth (70% of
the Algerian population is under 25), (24) who despaired of finding
work. Benjedid's policy of Arabization of schools exacerbated the
crisis by creating a cleavage between French-educated youth who had
access to lucrative international positions and Arabic-speaking youth
who were frequently unemployed. In addition, the importation of Arabic
teachers from Egypt meant that many teachers sympathetic to the Muslim
Brotherhood (25) spread this violent ideology in schools and mosques.
(26)

Into the mixture in the 1980's of growing social malaise and
political frustration stepped radical Islam. In fact, radical Islamic
movements have been a major factor of Algerian political life since the
1970's. Radical Islam explicitly rejects the very idea of an
Algerian nation and opposes to this the concept of the umma, a universal
community of believers which transcends regional differences and which
requires a government based entirely on shari'a. (27) The adoption
of a multiparty system by Benjedid and the emergence of a powerful
Islamic party in 1991--the FIS (Islamic Front for Salvation)--was viewed
with consternation by the military High Command, fearing a loss of their
role in the government along with their economic privileges. Following
the parliamentary elections of January, 1992, the military carried out a
coup d'etat and forced the resignation of President Benjedid. The
ensuing Islamic insurgency led by the FIS and its militant offshoot, GIA
(Armed Islamic Group) initiated a murderous campaign against both the
military regime and civilians.

The bloody decade of 1992-2002 began with the assassination of
President Mohamed Boudiaf, one of the revered leaders of the Algerian
Revolution and an architect of the modern Algerian nation. (28) Armed
Islamic fundamentalists (29) during this decade attacked both military
and civilian targets, singling out journalists, physicians, school
teachers, artists and intellectuals--educated people who represented a
threat to their rigid authoritarian ideology. In addition, many human
rights organizations, including Amnesty International, International
Women's Human Rights Law Clinic, and Women Living under Muslim
Laws, have reported that women have been particularly targeted for
violence and have been victims of rape, abduction, torture and murder
whenever they have deviated from the fundamentalist movement's
narrow interpretation of shari'a. (30) According to the scholar
Hafid Gafaiti, the opposing groups in the civil war--members of the FIS
and representatives of the military regime--are similar in that they
both represent a continuation of the same ruling political party, the
FLN, and both are based on "an obsession with unity, monotheism, be
it secular or religious, that by definition, cannot bear
multiplicity." (31)

President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika (1999-present), while defeating the
Islamic insurgency and restoring relative calm to Algeria, has still
failed to address many concerns of the Algerian population: an end to
corruption in government, greater economic opportunity for all citizens
and protection against civil rights violations. In spite of
constitutional guarantees of their equality with men, women continue to
be excluded from positions of leadership, particularly in politics,
business and law. (32) Bouteflika's government, moreover, has been
sharply criticized for failing to protect Algerian citizens against
continued terrorist attacks (33) and for granting amnesty to state-armed
militia and Islamic militants responsible for gross human rights
violations. (34)

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), the theoretician of the Algerian
Revolution and pre-eminent thinker on the issue of decolonization, was
also one of the first political analysts to examine Algerian
women's condition. In "Algeria Unveiled," from his essay,
A Dying Colonialism (1959), Fanon attempts to elucidate Algerian
women's role in the Algerian Revolution while also examining her
condition and demystifying her. Fanon correctly points out how Algerian
women participated actively in the Algerian Revolution and used their
veil as a strategic tactic, veiling or unveiling at different times, in
order to conceal weapons, to make themselves less easily identifiable in
the eyes of the French occupiers, or to demonstrate their rejection of
the values of the occupier. (35)

While trying to attack stereotypes of Algerian women, however,
Fanon perpetuates some of these very stereotypes. Fanon, along with many
other political thinkers of his generation, treats the topic of the
Algerian woman as a single, homogeneous societal group. According to
Fanon, the Algerian woman herself has chosen a life restricted to the
home, in order to prepare for battle: "The Algerian woman, in
imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a form of existence
limited in scope, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and
preparing for combat ..." Fanon fails to examine the role played by
Algerian men in the creation of a society in which women have been
largely cloistered. He also attempts to explain their perceived
"sclerosis" (36) and silence without analyzing historical
circumstances that have prevented many women from participating in
society.

Assia Djebar's novel, Paste est la prison

Assia Djebar's autobiographical novel, Vaste est la prison
(1995), the third volume of her "Algerian quartet," is set
against the backdrop of the Algerian civil war, which claimed the lives
of many of her closest friends, and against Algerian women's
condition throughout history. Djebar's novel raises many important
questions: How can art and reality overlap? How can fiction contribute
to socio-political change? What are the subversive poetics of her novel?
How does Djebar's autobiographical novel constitute activism?

As a Muslim, Arab woman, Djebar comes to autobiographical fiction
with great unease, since in her culture, women are traditionally silent
and invisible, and representation of the self is seen as a
transgression. Djebar's real name is Fatima-Zohra Imalayene. She
adopted the pseudonym Assia ("consolation") Djebar
("intransigent") in 1957 when she published her first novel,
La Soif, because, as she expresssed it, "In Maghrebian society,
women do not write. To write is to expose oneself." (37) She
describes the Algerian quartet as an "unveiling:.... In my first
books, I stepped forward veiled. In the quartet, I show myself."
(38)

A product of Western acculturation, Djebar mastered French thanks
to the encouragement of her father, a French instructor, and she thereby
gained mobility and the freedom to pursue her dreams as a writer,
filmmaker, historian and academic in Europe, Africa and North America.
But her bicultural and bilingual journey also left her estranged from
her maternal languages, Berber and dialectical Arabic, and from her
Algerian cultural heritage. In Vaste est la prison, Djebar weaves a
complex fabric composed of references to personal history, Algerian
history, an ongoing film project and events in present-day Algeria. One
thread holds all of these elements together: the theme of Algerian
women's condition. Djebar describes her Algerian quartet as a
double autobiography: "Mine--with a chorus of other women--and that
of my country." (39) Her autobiography becomes a means of
evaluating Algerian society and exploring its identity through the eyes
and voices of women, traditionally invisible.

Djebar contests her culture's repression of women by
dismantling the traditional structures of autobiography, history and
fiction to create hybrid narrative forms and by juxtaposing them. Djebar
said in a recent interview: "I could only find myself in the
breakdown of structures, in a confrontation with opposites." (40)
Linear history is replaced by temporal leaps between past, present and
future that disturb the reader's frame of reference. I will focus
on Djebar's objective correlatives for women's alienation as
seen in her complex narrative structures and temporal patterns, her
fluid representation of point of view, and her personal metaphors for
exile and alienation.

Djebar frames her autobiographical novel with short chapters that
question the value of writing. She describes writing in the opening
chapter as "dying, slowly dying," since it petrifies or
freezes something living, "trembling and pawing the ground"
(11). In the opening chapter she describes her struggle against her
impulse to be "self-effacing" and to distrust language (15).
Her concluding chapter questions again how she can write today,
surrounded by so many dead witnesses, victims of her country's
violence. She then expresses the urgency of writing in order to speak
for those silenced: "We think the dead are absent but, transformed
into witnesses, they want to write through us" (357). Through her
framing of Vaste est la prison, Djebar gives a rebuttal to her initial
view of fiction as distinct from reality. Instead, her final chapter is
a call to remember and to bear witness to the unspeakable crimes
committed in Algeria. By her framing technique, Djebar urges the reader
to leave behind his or her passive role as reader and to become an
activist. Art becomes an important tool for intervention and social
transformation.

Vaste est la prison is a rebuttal to an authoritarian Algerian
regime which has imposed unilateralism in language (modern literary
Arabic) and in ideology, particularly by its application of retrograde
Islamic laws to present-day political and social life. The historian
Peter R. Knauss describes present-day Algeria as crippled by an enduring
syndrome of patriarchy: "The persistence of patriarchy, the
dramatic tenacity of a system of male dominance and female
subordination, has been the dominant pattern in Algeria ... Algeria has
regressed rather than advanced in terms of improving the status of women
..." (41) In response, Djebar engages in a search for Algerian
identity that is based on the multilingual voices--in Berber and
dialectical Arabic--of Algerian women from her family and from the
nation's collective history.

The word "enemy," spoken in dialectical Arabic by a
middle-aged woman in a Moorish bath, referring to her husband, is the
catalyst for the narrator's reflection on relations between the
sexes in Part I: "This word--[l'e 'dou]--not one of
hatred, no, rather one of despair long frozen in place between the sexes
..." (15). In an autobiographical sequence of one hundred pages,
the narrator relives the story of her unconsummated passion for a man,
which ended in a violent physical confrontation with her husband and in
their separation and divorce. The husband, beating his wife and nearly
blinding her, becomes the enemy, thereby playing "the role that for
generations he had been assigned by the memory of the city" (109).
What appears to be an autobiographical sequence seems to be negated over
a hundred pages later when Djebar gives the narrator a fictional name,
"Isma" (234), thereby breaking the traditional
"autobiographical pact" which allows the reader to equate the
narrator with the author. (42) Furthermore, the story of domestic abuse
in Part I is echoed in Part IV by the historical account of a young
professor and journalist, Yasmina, who is murdered by armed insurgents
in 1994.

Djebar leaps between personal and collective history and
deliberately leaves her autobiographical sequence ambiguous, blurring
boundaries between fiction and reality in order to raise awareness of an
acute societal crisis in present-day Algeria--that of violence targeting
women. Djebar experienced personally Algeria's repressive social
policies against women and intellectuals: as a victim of domestic
violence, as a writer who lost many of her dearest friends to the civil
war of 1992-2002, and as an intellectual who was forced to live in exile
in France and the United States for much of her adult life. While Part I
traces the narrator's personal history, Part II jumps to the
archeological discovery of an ancient Berber inscription more than two
thousand years old in Dougga, Tunisia. The temporal leap and the genre
change from autobiography to African history break the linear chronology
of her novel. In an italicized, lyrical passage at the end of Part II,
however, Djebar connects this fifty-page narration to the novel's
theme of women's exclusion and resistance to roles prescribed by
traditional male-centered history. Tin Hinan, a Berber princess, was
able to resist the Arab conquest of Northern Africa and to transmit her
ancient Berber alphabet to other women, thereby preserving the oldest
language of Algeria still spoken today. In response to her
government's monolingual policy which threatens to erase
Algeria's multicultural history, Djebar offers a different reading
of Algerian history and identity, one based on multilingualism and
women's active contributions to Algeria's cultural heritage.

Djebar relates the story of the Dougga inscription as an historical
account, while also making references to the legends surrounding the
princess and her mysterious alphabet: "Her history had long been
told like a dream wreathed in legends, a fleeting silhouette as
evanescent as smoke, or a ghost, or a myth, an imaginary figure. She
suddenly became solid thanks to archeological discoveries ... in
1925" (164). Djebar crosses boundaries between history and fiction,
myth and reality, since both myth and history contribute to the
foundations of Algerian identity.

In Part III of Vaste est la prison, at 172 pages the longest
section of the novel, Djebar alternates between references to her
family, ancestors and friends, to a literary character and to her
ongoing film project. Djebar once more replaces linear chronology with a
polyphonic structure of narratives about women in past, present and
future, real or fictitious, linked by the double leitmotifs of
women's confinement and resistance. Titles of the chapters
reinforce Part III's musical structure: "First Movement,
Second Movement ..." alternating with film chapters entitled
"Arable Woman I, II ...," a pun on the word
"arable," meaning both fertile and capable of being cultivated
(literally and figuratively).

Djebar's Family History in Vaste est la Prison

Writing in order to "inscribe the silent and often obscured
history of women," and therefore "to repair ... the amnesia of
our society concerning an essential part of it," (43) Djebar
contests her nation's rigid patriarchal ideology by
"challenging the reduction of national identity to a unity defined
by religion or culture." (44) Djebar relives the lives of her
grandmother Fatima, her mother Bahia, and that of her many aunts,
focusing both on the constraints of their unique historical situation
and on their actions to rise above these constraints to become agents of
change. At the same time, Djebar pays tribute to her progressive father
who strongly advocated education for girls: "[We need] to send our
daughters to school, all of our daughters, in these villages and in the
old cities as well, where traditions benumb them" (301).

Djebar's grandmother, Fatima, given away by her father at age
fourteen to a rich elderly man who already had two wives, managed to run
a large household and to buy and sell property when she became widowed
at age seventeen. She acquired complete autonomy over her life when she
separated from her third husband, becoming for her granddaughter
"the model of feminine decisiveness and intelligence" (231).
Fatima had the resourcefulness and modern instinct to contact a French
doctor during a typhus epidemic, "the first Arab 'lady'
in the city who dared to do so" (239), thereby saving the life of
Assia's mother and making her own existence possible.

Djebar evokes the aristocratic demeanor of her mother Bahia, who as
a child of six lost her voice for a year because of grief over her
sister Cherifa's death in the typhus epidemic. Her mother,
constrained by tradition, managed nevertheless to become independent at
times. She was "engulfed beneath her veils," and hidden in the
back of a car, while her husband took a long detour to avoid having
public eyes catch even a glimpse of her, for according to him, "a
lady ... must not, because of her very worthiness, be thus exposed to
the gaze of ... spectators" (288-289). Yet she demonstrated her
independence by traveling alone to France during the Algerian Revolution
to visit her son in prison. She also showed her free intellectual spirit
by reciting Andalusian poetry, the cultural legacy of her ancestors who
had fled Spain during the seventeenth century to escape religious
persecution (175-176). Andalusian poetry becomes a metaphor for the lost
multicultural heritage of Algeria, part of the nation's identity
which women have preserved and transmitted for generations, like the
ancient Berber alphabet that survived thanks to Tin Hinan and her female
entourage.

Djebar's narrative of personal and collective history of
friends and relatives in Vaste est la prison elucidates the regressive
social policies of Algerian society and their repercussions on
women's lives. During the narrator's divorce proceedings, the
judge and her ex-husband speak "man to man" in literary Arabic
(315), a language the narrator has not mastered. Perceiving that a trap
is being set for her, she simply replies "no" to all questions
and is silent about the domestic abuse she suffered. Her lawyer later
informs her that because of a faint smile on her face, the judge decided
to rule against her in the divorce settlement (315). A recent Human
Rights Report on Algeria by the United States Department of State
confirms that thousands of domestic abuse cases have gone unreported
because of societal pressures and inequities in the penal code. (45)
Similarly, Djebar's story of Hania, a friend who died of a
miscarriage after having five pregnancies in short succession (319-320)
addresses another urgent social issue: women's lack of adequate
access to family planning and to legal abortions in Algeria. (46)

Djebar's Film Project

For Djebar, writing is a form of resistance, of revolt when
"the too heavy power of the State, of a religion, or of an evident
oppression" forces her to permanently say "no." (47)
Narrative genres and structure, point of view and aesthetic distance all
become blurred with the urgency of writing. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in the sections of Part III devoted to her film project.

In the section entitled "Femme arable I," the narrator
describes, as if in a diary entry, the first shooting of a scene in an
unnamed film. She then interrupts the narrative to directly address the
women who are the subject of the film: "Community of women shut
away yesterday and today, an image-symbol that is the true action, the
drive behind this hunt for images that is beginning. A female body
completely veiled in white cloth, her face completely concealed, only a
hole left free for the eyes..." The narrator then suddenly adopts
the first-person plural form of address to identify totally with the
confined women of time immemorial: "[The veiled woman] a shadowy
shape that has strolled along for centuries, never screaming that we
were enshrouded, never tearing off the veil and even our skin with it if
required" (179). She jumps back to first-person singular:
"This image is the reality of my childhood, and the childhood of my
mother and my aunts, and my girl cousins who were sometimes the same age
as me ..." (179). Djebar then inserts a passage in the familiar
"tu" form, using direct discourse, as if an anonymous woman is
speaking: "You cannot exist outside: the street is theirs, the
world is theirs. Theoretically you have the right to equality, but shut
up 'inside,' confined. Incarcerated" (180).

The final paragraph of this chapter jumps again from first-person
singular to first-person plural to suggest how the act of producing a
film may have repercussions in the wider society: "This strange
slit...a little black triangle where the eye should be, this miniature
gaze will henceforth be my camera. All of us from the world of the
shadow women, reversing the process: We are the ones finally who are
looking, who are beginning" (180). Djebar opens up the boundaries
between art and society: the art of filmmaking by a woman and about
women may herald social and political changes.

Djebar conveys the immediacy and urgency of her film project by
crossing boundaries in narrative point of view and also by blurring
distinctions between fiction and reality. Two female actresses in the
film project are young children whose real lives intrude on their work.
Zohra, a twelve-year-old girl, is fascinated to see an adult female
actress in the film moving about freely, an astonishing event for her
(309). The narrator tells us that she and another child actress,
Aichoucha, are illiterate, something that the narrator calls
"scandalous in today's Algeria" (257). The narrator
"hears" Zohra's mute appeal to the adult actress:
"No, don't be a dream, you at least, win this freedom of
movement, to question, to see, that we will all envy you for
afterward" (310). Djebar raises the question, by means of her
narrative, of whether a documentary film project can intervene to
produce change in the real lives of present and future generations, even
if characters are merely "symbols of hope" (310). She
demonstrates that her camera as well as her pen can be important
political tools with which to challenge authority.

Djebar expropriates French, the colonizer's language with its
painful legacy of oppression and enriches it with the rhythm and
phrasing of her maternal languages--dialectical Arabic and Berber. The
title of the novel refers to an ancient Berber song, which she
transcribes in both Berber and French (242-243). The title, Vaste est la
prison, alludes to both suffering and to the song containing those words
in her native tongue, which seems to calm her grieving mother after the
death of her older sister (243). Djebar suggests that by incorporating
the rich linguistic heritage of Algeria's past into present-day
society, Algeria can reclaim its true national identity.

In Vaste est la prison, Djebar expresses objective correlatives for
women's alienation by her complex narrative and temporal patterns
and by her personal metaphors for exile and exclusion. The cloistered
woman whom she addresses in her film is a metaphor for the "five
hundred million or so segregated women in the Muslim world"
(179-180) who do not fully enjoy human rights. The young illiterate
shepherdess, Aichoucha, becomes a symbol of bankrupt Algerian social
policies that neglect girls' education. Djebar sees metaphors for
women's condition in both history and fiction. The character of
Zoraide in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-1615) represents
the presence of an Algerian woman in the first great modern novel. For
Djebar, Zoraide personifies Algerian women writers today, since in the
famous novel Zoraide, much like Djebar, is an Algerian fugitive from her
native country who escapes confinement for a new world of uncertainty
and unlimited possibilities (173).

Writing as Resistance and Activism

Djebar is ultimately pessimistic about the potential of writing to
bring about change in Algeria. Using a metaphor that suggests both the
frailty and the power of language to confront injustice and violence,
she sees herself propelled by a ghostly army: "the white procession
of ghost-grandmothers behind me becomes an army propelling me on; words
of the quavering, lost language rise up while the males out in front
gesticulate in the field of death" (350). Her narrative of personal
and collective history, written with the accent and rhythms of
dialectical Arabic and Berber, becomes an "army" to stop the
carnage in Algeria.

We return to questions asked earlier in this essay: How is it
possible to write in a way that contributes to socio-political change?
How can a writer address mass scale human tragedy and social injustice?
How can fiction become resistance and activism? In the final chapter of
Vaste est la prison, Djebar asks these questions and finds an answer to
them in poetic metaphors that appeal deeply to human emotion, at a time
when prose seems inadequate. Narrative prose gives way to poetic verse
and to wordplay as traditional syntax breaks down. Blood spilled by
victims of political violence becomes the ink with which to write:
"Write, the dead of today want to write: now, how can one write
with blood?" (357)

Addressing her country directly, she calls her mother
"bitter," (making a pun on the French words "mere"
and "amere") and calls her own writing "screaming"
(making a pun on "j'ecris"[I write] and "je
crie"[I scream]):

Although she acknowledges that she possesses only an "army of
words" as a weapon, Assia Djebar uses the subversive potential of
language to attack her country's misogyny, along with its
authoritarian and retrograde ideology. According to the theories of new
historicity, there is no one "history" in the sense of a
narrative of indisputable past events. Instead, there are only our
versions, our representations of the past. (48) Djebar constructs an
alternate history of Algeria which restores women's rightful place
in Algerian society as agents of social change and as preservers of
their nation's multilingual and multicultural heritage.
Djebar's writing contributes to socio-political change by
undermining the dominant view of Algerian history as promoted for
decades by authoritarian regimes, and by challenging these misogynist
views.

While maintaining a cautious distance from feminist movements in
Algeria, Djebar prefers to achieve activism through multiple forms of
artistic production. Within the single work, Vaste est la prison, Djebar
speaks as an historian, correcting erroneous representations of women,
as a writer of autobiography giving personal testimonials of women, as a
novelist subverting traditional rhetorical forms and as a filmmaker
creating new role models of women engaged actively in society. She
speaks in the last chapter, finally, as a poet, appealing deeply to
human emotions which have the potential to inspire others to act. Her
works, published first in French and then translated into many
languages, have not been widely read in Algeria because of her
government's policy of Arabization, which has promoted Arabic
monolingualism at the expense of French literacy. Instead of speaking
directly to Algerians, Djebar addresses social injustice while living in
exile. She hopes to spark change by engaging international readers in
the Diaspora.

Djebar creates in Vaste est la prison a Maghrebian novel that
examines one of the roots of Algeria's identity crisis: its
exclusion and alienation of women. Like the heroine of Sophocles'
tragedy Antigone (442 BCE), who went into exile to carry out her own
form of resistance to injustice, Djebar rejects the duplicity of much of
today's political discourse. Instead, she speaks to us through her
novel of personal testimonial and historical narrative and she summons
us, her readers, to respond.

(4) Assia Djebar, Vaste est la prison, (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).
English language version, So Vast the Prison (New York: Seven Stories,
1999). All further references to this novel will be to this English
edition, with page numbers given in parentheses.

(5) The term "new historicists" refers to a school of
literary critics associated with Stephen Greenblatt, who first
popularized the term in 1982 in his preface to a collection of essays
published in the journal Genre.

These critics believe that literary texts cannot be isolated as
entities that lie outside of history. Instead, they believe that
artistic texts actively help to shape history and produce social change.
See M. Robson, Stephen Greenblatt (London: Routledge, 2008): 1-13.

(6) Mark Robson, Stephen Greenblatt (London: Routledge, 2008): 2-7.

(7) The term "Maghreb" refers to three Arab-Islamic
countries that are geographically contiguous in northern Africa:
Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. They experienced French colonization and
achieved independence in the mid-1950's for Morocco and Tunisia and
in 1962 for Algeria. See Mounira Charrad, States and Women's
Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco
(Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2001): 2.

(29) I am using the term "Islamic fundamentalism" to
refer to a movement based on static, literal interpretations of the
Quran and Sunna which seeks to impose an all-embracing political system
on a society and which excludes all other movements. See Karima
Bennoune: 69.

(33) The U.S. Department of State reported 321 deaths in 2008
related to terrorist violence. Most terrorist attacks were attributed to
the group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. See 2008 Human Rights Report:
Algeria: 1.

[1] Dr. Joyce B. Lazarus is Professor of Modem Languages at
Framingham State College. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in French from
Harvard University and her B.A. from Queens College, C.U.N.Y. In
addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Parole aux jeunes
(Heinle, 1992), Strangers and Sojourners: Jewish Identity in
Contemporary Francophone Fiction (Lang, 1999) and In the Shadow of
Vichy: the Finaly Affair (Lang, 2008). She can be reached at:
jlazarus@framingham.edu.

With its smell, perhaps.
With its vomit or its phlegm, easily.
With the fear that is its halo.
Writing, of course, even a novel ...
About flight.
About shame (358).

I do not call you mother, bitter Algeria,
That I write,
That I cry, voice, hand, eye (358).